Дональд Уэстлейк - Forever and a Death

But the first thing was to find a weapon, some way to defend himself, and the second thing was to stay ahead of the search until he could circle around behind it. They were starting to look at the top deck, ignoring for the moment the bridge, moving from forward to aft, two of them on each side of the ship, taking their time. So Manville moved on ahead, and entered the large glass-domed dining room, and from there he went into the small service kitchen.

There were a lot of knives in here, some big cleavers, too, but Manville hoped for something better. Something like a club, to knock somebody out. He didn’t want to go around cutting people, wouldn’t know how to do it, probably didn’t have the stomach for it. The idea of stabbing another person made him queasy.

He looked past the peppermill two or three times before he finally focused on it. It was a large thing, darkly lustrous, like a rook in a giant’s chess set; probably a foot and a half long, it was made of rosewood, and when Manville picked it up it was as heavy as a baseball bat, with most of the weight near the base, where the metal grinding mechanism was fixed.

The peppercorns inside rustled when Manville hefted the thing, and he felt at first that it was too ridiculous to think of defending himself with a peppermill. But it was heavy , and it had the right shape for a club, and there was nothing else in here.

Carrying the peppermill next to his leg, Manville left the serving kitchen and went back through the dining room.

The four men were slowly moving this way, two through the central corridor, checking every door along their route, and one on each side, along the outer decks. Manville would have preferred to tackle the leader, who was older and scrawnier than the other three, but he needed to go after somebody who was alone, and that meant one of the bruisers searching along the deck.

At the aft end of the dining room, glass-windowed doors on both sides led out to the decks. On the starboard side, another door, solid wood, just aft of this one, led to a stairwell going down. The searchers were entering through every doorway they reached, looking inside, then backing out again. Manville stationed himself just inside the dining room door, gripped the peppermill hard, looked through the window, and waited.

Here he came. A big man, he walked with hunched shoulders and with head thrust forward, as though sniffing out his prey. His pistol was in his right hand, and he stepped cautiously, looking over his shoulder often, pausing before entering a doorway, then backing swiftly out again.

The man reached that stairwell door. Manville hung back, looking through the window in the door, seeing only the right side of him, the dark pants and black sweater, the right arm bent, pistol beyond Manville’s range of vision. The man stepped forward, disappearing, and Manville took a deep breath. He’d never done anything like this before, never anything like this. But there was no choice, and the time was now.

He pushed open the door, eased outside, stood with his back to the wall beside the open stairwell door, right arm cocked up across his upper chest, peppermill held up beyond his left ear, and waited for the man to back out to the deck, and from the other side of the ship he heard the scream.

It threw him off. All he could think was: They found her! And it immobilized him for just a second, while the searcher, as startled as he was by the sound of that scream, came lunging out of the doorway, forward rather than backward, pistol right there , and he actually saw Manville before Manville thought to swing the peppermill as hard as he could. It hit the man in the face, at the top of the nose, between the eyes. It knocked him back a step, but it didn’t knock him out. It wasn’t heavy enough, the damn thing wasn’t heavy enough.

And the man still had that pistol. Desperate, Manville swung again, and the heavy base of the peppermill thudded down on the man’s right wrist, and the pistol fell to the deck and went sliding away,

I need that pistol! Manville swung the peppermill with all his might, like a carpenter driving a masonry nail into a brick wall, three hard pounding frantic punches at that face, and then the peppermill cracked diagonally in two, the base and a long triangle of the handle bouncing off the man’s chest to fall at his feet, leaving in Manville’s hand a kind of long jagged wooden dagger.

The man was still on his feet, though goggle-eyed and reeling, hands groping as though for an opponent he couldn’t see. Manville lunged at his face with this new dagger, and the man staggered back, lost his footing, and toppled backward down the steep flight of stairs.

Pistol first. Manville ran to where it still moved on the deck, the polished metal sliding over the polished wood surface with every tremor of the ship. Hurling away the remnant of the peppermill, he snatched up the pistol, then ran back to point it down the stairwell. Only then did he look past the barrel of the gun, to see the man in a twisted heap down there, unconscious or dead.

Kim. Manville hurried back into the dining room and across it and out the door on the other side, and down there to his left, dimly illuminated by the night lights within the ship, he saw the group of them, the three men just now dragging Kim from the launch to the deck while she weakly and uselessly struggled.

Manville was about to run down there, to stop them and save her, when he suddenly realized he didn’t know this pistol he now clenched so hard in his right hand. It was a tool, after all, and you’re supposed to know your tools, and he didn’t know this tool. It would have a safety, he knew that, but was the safety at this moment on or off? He didn’t know.

He stood just out of sight of the people on deck, and studied the thing, a revolver with a bit of bullet showing at the back of each chamber. This small lever here on the side, handy to the right thumb; wouldn’t that be the safety?

The lever moved up and down, and when he first tried the thing it was in the down position. Would the man have done his searching with the safety on or off? There was nothing written on the pistol, no icons, no hint.

I’m an engineer, Manville thought, if I were the one who’d designed this, which way would turn the safety off, which way would turn it on? I would want the more speed when turning it off, would have less reason for speed when switching it on. The quickest simplest motion here is for the thumb to push this lever down, so if I were the engineer on this project I’d design it so the safety was off when the lever was down. The lever’s down.

If I’m wrong, I’ll know it when and if I have to pull the trigger. With luck, I’ll still have time to put my thumb under the lever and push it up. Without luck, I’m dead anyway, because this is nothing I know anything about.

Manville stepped forward onto the deck, the pistol held out in front of him, and moved toward the group, all of them now on deck, clustered around Kim, half-supporting her. The leader was saying, “—down to her cabin,” and of course that’s what they’d want, for Kim to be dead in her cabin, smothered with a pillow.

“Stop!” Manville shouted. “Put your hands up!” They looked at him with astonishment, but without fear. Because they were dragging Kim, none of them had a pistol in his hand, and yet they looked at Manville and he could see they were unafraid of him, unimpressed by him. They know, he thought, they know this is their world, not mine.

It was like meeting a dangerous dog: Don’t show your fear. “Everybody hands up!” he yelled. “Kim, get out of the way! Lean against the rail!”

The tableau they presented to him was this: The leader stood in the middle, one arm around Kim’s waist, holding her up, with the other big man to the right and the smaller man to the left. None of them obeyed him, none put their hands up. The leader didn’t release Kim, but held her even tighter. None of them even seemed worried.